Obama Caves, Sells Out Middle-Class For Wealthy

When a deal is bad beyond all pretext, the only thing left to do is spin. Democrats, including Senate lackeys and Administration lummoxes, spin the Senate version of the Fiscal Crap Sandwich to mean absolute victory over Republicans who have "finally" raised revenue (read "taxes.") Republicans spin that they moved to give even more people a tax break in 2013. Both obscure the reality; President Obama sold out the Middle Class for the wealthy.

Obama ran for re-election with a near exclusive message of "millionaires and billionaires" paying their "fair share." While some might have seen this as pure pandering, meant solely to gin up class warfare resentment against the 1% that the Obama-Pelosi-Reid-backed Occupy movement had started a year earlier, many of those in the middle class believed Obama.

College students, wondering where their employment will come from in a shrinking economy with even fewer prospects for job creation than in 2012 (thanks to Obamacare) believed him. They thought taxing the millionaires and billionaires would make things fairer. Somehow, they concluded, this would lead to more maneuvered wealth, and more opportunities. Why else would Obama take 18-29 year olds by 24 points over Gov. Mitt Romney?

The unemployment rate has remained around 8% for over a year. Yet Obama promised those middle class people without a job, or who were underemployed (a whopping 14.4% in November 2012, while 350,000 people left the labor force) that the tax revenue from the millionaires and billionaires would rectify their situation. What else could someone paying their "fair share" possibly mean? It means that when they pay, everything will be ok.

Yet, the McConnell/Biden plan that came out of the US Senate in the early hours of New Year's Day was not what the president promised. Obama said that millionaires start at $250,000 per year. (For the sake of this article, we will not begin to comprehend the president's "arithmetic" that makes $250,000 equal to $1,000,000. One simplistic commentary at a time, please.)

But this plan, led by his go-to guy, the Scrapper from Scranton, Vice President Joe Biden, gives a plan that raises tax rates on those making over $450,000 per year. This reduces the amount that would be raised over a decade from $800 billion to $600 billion.